We are fast approaching the end of January and the point in the New Year when the majority of people's New Year's resolutions have already failed. This is, however, the time for renewed efforts to focus one's resources on achieving the desired goal. There are two keys to reaching your goals:

1. Do not view a minor failure (i.e., you just ate a quart of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream) as final defeat (i.e., Well I might as well stop trying to give up sweets); and
2. Focus on a sequence of short term goals that make your larger goal seem more manageable (i.e., instead of "I will weigh 120 pounds by December 31st" set a series of goals such as "I will weigh 152  pounds by the end of February. I will weigh 148 pounds by the end of March." etc).

These ideas do not only apply to personal goals, but to business goals as well. If you are trying to improve your cardiology billing performance in 2009, you should build upon these concepts. So, given these two points what is the best way to achieve a New Year's resolution of improving your cardiology billing? The best place to start is with the goal of getting your claims out the door clean.  This is a great starting point because it does many wonderful things:

• This goal forces you to concentrate on the most critical elements of cardiovascular billing - gathering the proper information and using it to create a clean claim;
• It allows you to focus on achievable, smaller goals (85% of claims go out clean in January, 87% go out clean in February, etc);
• Set backs position you for better performance tomorrow. How? You look at the claims that did not go out the door clean and learn what went wrong. Do you have a problem at the front desk with gathering demographics? Do you have a problem with training your data entry people? Do you have one physician that consistently codes incorrectly? Do you have one payer that really dislikes one of your common procedures?
• Technology can be a powerful ally in achieving this goal. The use of coding tools, automated demographic verification tools and scrubbing claims will eliminate many sources of up-front errors that lead to claim rejections.

What does all of this mean? It means this is the time for a renewed focus on your cardio billing business goals. It is time to:

• Understand where you are starting your journey (what portion of your claims are accepted on first submission);
• Write down a powerful and meaningful performance improvement goal (my practice will have over 95% of its claims accepted on the initial transmission);
• Break them down into bite size pieces (I will improve clean claim submissions by 2% each month), and
• Adopt the mentality that you will learn from your mistakes.

This approach and focus can allow your cardiology billing efforts to reach new standards of excellence in 2009.

Copyright 2009 by Cardiology Billing Partners